


Hunting Season

by nogoaway



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Don’t copy to another site, Dreams, First Time, M/M, Motorcycles, Post-Canon, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-01-07
Packaged: 2019-10-05 22:43:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17333780
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nogoaway/pseuds/nogoaway
Summary: Brad was not having a post-combat freak-out, incidentally. Brad was having a vacation. But he didn't expect a codependent, sister-fucking, whiskey-tango retard like Ray, who was raised in a pig sty with eighteen other cretinous wolf-pups sharing a single teat, to understand why a man might want to be alone with himself every once in a while.In which Brad stalks off into the Arizona desert rather than sleep in a real bed, and Nate is also a little fucked up upon re-entry.





	Hunting Season

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. This is fan fiction about characters from a television series, not real people.  
> 2\. Brad's Mom is a nosy eggheaded shrink who is poisoning America with mass over-prescription of antidepressants and he loves her.  
> 3\. This fic is a Frankenstein's monster of scenes and concepts I have removed from a larger thing I'm working on. So if characterization seems off.... sorry. That's why. I hope it's enjoyable anyway.

A recruiter told him once that some guys traveled so much when they were in that home felt like another foreign country to them.

Oceanside wasn't a foreign country. Oceanside was an alien planet. The cab dropped him in front of his parents' house and he stood there staring at the rows of identical, stumpy conical evergreens that had replaced the flat hedges he grew up with. Everything was so _clean_.

The door opened before he was ready. Sharon burst down the stairs without closing it and hugged him tightly around the waist. It felt strange to be touched, and he stiffened up. She released him quickly.

“Come on in,” she said “Mom made kugel.”

When he put his bag down by the table his mother hugged him tightly and then left the kitchen to cry in private. He followed her out to the porch and held her as she sobbed, listening to the evening crickets and feeling absolutely nothing he could name.

* * *

It was worse than after Afghanistan. He should have arranged a sublet.

His mother was trying to CBT him back to normalcy, sending him on little errands where he'd have to interact with civilians: gas stations, bodegas, can you pick up my dry cleaning, Bradley? In line at the hardware store she'd suddenly remember she needed masking tape, if Brad could pay for the other things at the register? Whenever anyone arrived at the house she was always conveniently on the phone, leaving him to answer the door and deal with whatever it was-- Mrs. Kelly from down the road returning a pie tin, Girl Scouts, the Verizon guy. With every banal interaction Brad grew more and more irritated with the current state of his reality, a fake world where nothing mattered and no one was genuine.

In particular he couldn't handle being anywhere with a television, which meant bars, most retail establishments, and the house when Hannah was in it. Advertisements enraged him; America was hundreds of thousands of dollars spent hocking self-coiling hoses, Gushers, Viagra in Technicolor with paid actors. Walgreens stocked eighteen varieties of Band-Aid and he stood in the aisle like a zombie, paralyzed by the existential horror that was infinite choices about nothing even remotely substantive. He turned to give Fick a look and perhaps delegate the decision making to his betters, but of course no one was there.

Even his body didn't know what to do with peacetime. He ate a salad with dinner and drank orange juice at breakfast and spent the morning shitting his guts out. There was a constant ringing in his ears that he thought was tinnitus until he realized it was just the background noise of being in a place where every square inch of developed space was occupied by some electrical appliance or another. The house smelled wrong. _He_ smelled wrong.

The sound of traffic made his head hurt. He was perpetually tense waiting for mortars, especially at night. Sometimes when the window A/C unit kicked on he jolted awake and spent the next few hours prowling between the pantry and the fridge, unsure what he was hungry for but not able to settle. He organized the pantry by food group, then alphabetically, then by caloric content per serving. There were two tins of tuna fish and a yellow Betty Crocker cake mix he remembered from before he left; everything else was new and strange. They made jelly in squeeze bottles now. His mother had switched peanut butter brands. He wondered how Hasser was doing. Sometimes he got back to sleep.

He made it through four dinners, five breakfasts, an afternoon servicing the Hornet while his father loomed in the garage doorway and tiptoed around his bad attitude, and a family excursion to the theater (the Matrix sequel. It was horrible.) before he snapped.

“I have to get out of here,” he told his mother as she pored over her checkbook in the study “Just for a few days. I need to be alone.”

She took her reading glasses off and laid them on the desk, rubbed at her eyes.

“I have spent the last six months eating, sleeping, and shitting in enclosed spaces with four to forty other men. It's unnatural.”

“You're not sleeping. I can hear you puttering around at night.”

“I'm jetlagged.”

“Bradley.” She gestured at the desk blotter, the stack of patient checks, the ancient brick of the DSM-III she used as a paperweight “I happen to have some experience in this area.”

His own fury startled him. He swallowed it, afraid of what he might say. Instead he took a deep breath and released it slowly. He was an adult. This was his life.

“I'll be back by dinner on Saturday,” he said.

She frowned at him. “Leave your phone on.”

* * *

Brad was at a gas station/taqueria off the 111 when his phone rang. It was Ray. He hung up without picking up, ordered four goat tacos from the teenager behind the counter, and went to browse the beer selection while he waited.

Ray called again twenty seconds later, when Brad hit the IPAs.

“Ray,” he said, for the fifth time in as many days, “I am not going to TJ with you.”

“Homes I know I pinky promised to let you have your post-combat freak-out in peace, but you really gotta come home, man, it's an emergency.” Ray was at maybe eighty-five percent of his maximum words per second-- not as bad as Brad had ever witnessed, but enough that it was probably chemically induced.

Brad was not having a post-combat freak-out, incidentally. Brad was having a vacation. But he didn't expect a codependent, sister-fucking, whiskey-tango retard like Ray, who was raised in a pig sty with eighteen other cretinous wolf-pups sharing a single teat, to understand why a man might want to be alone with himself every once in a while.

He began to relay this distinction to Ray with appropriate relish, and in small words.

Ray cut him off. “Brad, the LT is leaving. Like, permanently. Resigning or quitting or whatever.”

“ _Captain_ Fick,” Brad said, juggling a bomber of Lagunitas out of the fridge from behind crates of Corona “is well within his rights to separate from the Corps and return to whatever ivory tower of liberal iniquity produced him. I fail to see how this constitutes an emergency.”

“I mean what the fuck, homes! I know command is retarded and all and Iraq was a cluster--” He _heard_ Ray double-take “You are not surprised by this. You knew this already.”

“I knew this already,” Brad confirmed.

“You knew and you didn't tell me.”

“It wasn't any of your fucking business, was it?” He closed the door of the fridge a little too heavily, and spent a fraction of a second composing himself. He was not going to lose his shit over this in a gas station. He was done losing his shit over anything Fick-related, even tangentially. Fick was leaving them and going somewhere far, far away to do something better suited to his prodigious intellect and sophisticated manners, and that didn't piss Brad off at _all_. “We'll get a new one, Ray, and it'll be the same old shit. This is why I don't let you mental defectives name every orphaned desert vermin we come across. You get attached.”

The kid behind the counter waved a styrofoam container at him, and Brad nodded in acknowledgement.

“I can't believe you are disrespecting the memory of Ronald Round-Ears like this, Bradley. He was a king among prairie dogs and everybody loved him, except for you, because you have no heart and hate joy and happiness.”

“Leave Fick alone,” Brad said, and then, louder to be heard over the paroxysms of renewed grief that Ray was working himself into “goodbye, Ray.”

He ate his lunch sitting on a couple of wooden stairs sticking out from the station's back door and watched the occasional big rig blow past. Iraq had instilled in him a new appreciation for cold beer and flavorful food. The tacos came with rice and black beans-- when the tines of the plastic fork squeaked over the bottom of the container, he thought about Fick telling him how a buddy of his from Dartmouth had a campaign going to ban styrofoam in all of Hanover, New Hampshire. If that didn't capture everything that was wrong with civilian life, Brad didn't know what did.

Fick had laughed at Brad's expression when he told him this. It was the third time Brad had made Fick laugh without meaning to. He didn't keep track of the times he'd managed to do it on purpose, because those didn't supply any new information about what Fick found funny.

Brad, being highly trained in reconnaissance and also a sucker, was always on the lookout for new information about Nate Fick and his various opinions.

He needed to stop thinking about it. Fuck Ray for calling anyway. Brad had been having a perfectly decent day. Fuck Brad for picking up, really. He crushed the 22 against his knee. It was Saturday. Brad had been traversing Northern Mexico for the last two days. He was supposed to get back on I-8 heading West and make it home by nightfall.

He stood up, ditched the styrofoam in a black barrel trash can that radiated the stinking heat of decomposition, and decided he'd rather go to Arizona. He called his mother to tell her he wouldn't be making it for dinner, and then he turned his phone off.

* * *

Brad did some things in Iraq, and he had some things happen to him, and he was in the vicinity of several things that just happened in general to a lot of people, often a group of 23 people of which he was one.

He was never decided on which category the thing with Fick fell into. There was no quantifying how much of it was him, how much of it was Fick, and how much was just the place they were at the time they were in it.

It was nothing solid anyway, never verbalized or consummated or otherwise acknowledged. It just lumbered along between them like a piece of hideous old furniture draped in a sheet of plausible deniability. The horny elephant in the room.

Case in point, the _grand fucking denouement_ of the thing with Fick was this:

In a dim stairwell in an abandoned cigarette factory, after two weeks of managing Person's amphetamine intake and tracking Hasser's circadian rhythms and changing Trombley's diapers and making sure all the little children played nice with the Reporter so he didn't come back with a vengeance like Carrie White with a tell-all liberal menstrual rag special, and after communicating this to Fick with a teenage babysitter's sleep-deprived pathos over bad cigarettes, he licked his thumb and made a show of reaching out to wipe something off of Fick's face, nothing in particular, because it could have been anything, they were both filthy, and instead of cutting Brad off in any of the myriad ways he had available to him Fick went still and let Brad's wet thumb brush his bottom lip, and he breathed out a little sound that Brad felt all through his body and then he about-faced and was out of sight so immediately that Brad did a double-take at the hallway, since he had clearly misjudged the length of it.

It had been weeks, and he still wondered if he dreamed the whole thing up.

* * *

The ranger on duty at Kofa Wildlife Refuge was former 2/7, and promised to stow Brad's bike at the Visitor's Center. He was mystified that Brad didn't want a discount on a game permit. Apparently it was Bighorn Sheep season.

“Just here to hike,” Brad said, and fiddled with the little tin figurine of a covered wagon that sat on the service desk. The wheels spun. Junk. America was full of fucking junk.

The ranger eyed Brad's pack meaningfully. “You're not gonna make me walk all the way out to Signal Peak to recover your body, are you? This is a wilderness area. It can get cold at night.”

“I'm not a moron,” Brad said. And then, for no fucking apparent reason, “I just got back.”

“Yeah,” said the ranger. He was thirty-five at most. Wedding ring, full beard. Undeterred. “I can tell. You're not gonna make me walk out there, are you, brother?”

“You have my bike,” Brad said, and bought a completely redundant mylar space blanket off of the retail rack along with the map, just to shut him up.

Brad seethed about it all the way through Palm Canyon. He wasn't suicidal. What would make him suicidal would be going home and being assaulted from all sides by extraneous crap and insipid civilians and his family, who he loved but couldn't spend time with right now without wanting to shoot himself in the head.

Nothing anyone talked about made sense. None of it was important. Television and politics and who was dating who, who was reproducing, who was moving, who got a new car. Conversations of this type were so molasses-slow and inane that just overhearing them was torturous. Brad wanted to scream every time he had to stand in a checkout line or at a bus stop behind someone with a cell phone. Couldn't bear it; couldn't block it out.

Palm Canyon was lousy with campers, many of them families with big four-man tents. He went off the trail as soon as he could and started jogging, feeling his body settling into the familiar rhythm of a ruck. The spiny rock faces and dry scrub felt more like Afghanistan than Iraq. Afghanistan was good memories-- a time in his life that made sense.

Even though there was no risk of sandstorms, Brad dug his grave in the lee-side of a vertical rock formation out of habit. Digging was more satisfying here than it had been in Iraq-- the dirt had heft and substance in the blade of his e-tool, wasn't fine like dust. Just being out of uniform felt decadent. He took his time finding a good rock to lay his head on, and ate his energy bar with relish. Finally, solitude.

Brad curled up around his pack and watched the full moon with one eye open, listening to the rustle of barberry and the scuttle of lizards and the perfectly sensible natural world. It was remarkable what you could hear in the desert in the absence of a batallion's-worth of stinking human bodies and the caravan of combustion engines needed to keep them alive. The slightest breeze stirred up rustling in flowering greasewood, lizards sped through crackling dry burro-bush in spastic twitches. The air hummed with the low harmony of desert crickets and distant frogs-- that meant water to his North. Occasionally he'd hear the call and response of cactus wrens-- an elongated, stuttering croak like vinyl skipping.

There was no such thing as true silence here, not like there was in the moments before an artillery blast. Still, he found himself tensing with alertness every time the chirping and croaking ceased, a part of him he couldn't control expecting bursts of light and pillars of sand, brick dust, human bone. More than once he got up to piss and reached for a rifle that wasn't there. Combat readiness was habitual and had to be consciously unlearned. He didn't want to unlearn it. He felt most himself like this, finely tuned and honed to an edge.

He should take that exchange with RM in the winter, he thought. Mountain warfare would be perfect, and he wouldn't be stuck at Pendleton listening to war stories about Fick, missing Fick, turning to his right to commiserate about something to find no one there he wanted to share himself with. He wanted to be a stranger for a while.

It barely dropped to fifty around 0100, not enough for him to need the blanket or a bag or any kind of snivel gear. In the groggy moments approaching sleep, he thought, _Did I wake Trombley for watch?_ before remembering.

* * *

He dreamed about the vehicle, of course, because he'd never be free of the fucking vehicle.

Ray was driving and his sisters were in the backseat, completely unconcerned as they barreled down a steep wooded incline, barely weaving between rocks and trees like an out of control downhill skier. Ray was bitching about the lack of depth perception in the NVGs. They lost a mirror and an antenna and two ammo cans off the back, and then they went over a ledge and plunged a few hundred feet into the coldest, blackest water Brad had ever felt.

He hauled Hannah and Sharon to the rocky shoreline blindly, every inch of his skin stinging with cold, his hands numb and frozen into fists in their jackets. Ray was sitting, bedraggled, on a wet boulder and insisted through chattering teeth on _going back for his guitar, homes, it's irreplaceable._ Brad promised to get it if Ray promised to shut the fuck up. He dove under again with a flashlight beam that vanished four inches in front of the bulb and swam down, down.

He saw the victor. He saw a graveyard of victors. They were full of children.

He untangled tiny bodies from seatbelts and window frames as his own limbs slowly froze solid. It got harder and harder to move the longer he was underwater. His blood and muscles were freezing. He had to get them out. Impossibly, they were still breathing. He had to get them out.

Pale bodies lay on the rocks like beached fish. Poke sat on a stump, smoking. "LT for you, Iceman," he said, and handed Brad the hook.

"We're Oscar Mike, Brad." Fick was fuzzy, hard to make out.

"I can't go, sir."

"I'm not sticking around here. Get a move on, Sergeant."

"I have to stay." Brad was pleading now. His lips were numb. His tongue was bloated in his mouth. "I'm not finished. I'm not finished."

The line went dead. Something was watching him from up on the ledge. He looked and saw nothing.

The moon was full.

* * *

He woke glazed in cooling sweat and was instantly alert to the presence to his nine. He reached for his rife and hit dirt. The movement startled his visitor, who froze with one leg extended, body slinking low. Yellow eyes gleamed out of a narrow face, fur pale and bluish in the moonlight.

Brad let his hand fall slowly and relaxed into stillness. The coyote tensed and crept backwards a step, contemplating him in turn.

"Ballsy little fucker, creeping up on me," Brad breathed "Look at you."

They stared at each other for full minutes, each assessing. The animal's flanks rose and fell slowly. It wasn't afraid of him, but it didn't come any closer, either.

Brad wondered if it had been stalking him as he hiked, or if it had stumbled upon his camp. It couldn't have been more than forty pounds, leaner than a domestic dog of comparable size. Its massive ears were locked onto him, but one twitched around occasionally at the croak of a frog or wren, recalibrating. The moon was bright enough that Brad could make out whiskers.

He shifted experimentally, sitting up. The coyote slunk back a few yards, then turned and darted off into the night.

Brad stared after it, caught up in a sense of wonder and sacredness despite himself. How strange to feel it here in Arizona, while Mesopotamia, the birthplace of agriculture and the cradle of civilization, had just felt like a place.

He wasn't getting any more sleep, he admitted, and rose to fill in the grave. If he started now he could make it through Palm Canyon before all those campers woke up. He could be like the coyote, moving between sleeping bodies unseen, hunting something bigger in the distance.

* * *

The parking lot was nearly empty by the time Brad returned to pick up his bike. It was Sunday, he remembered. End of the weekend was meaningful for most people, there was a rhythm to civilian life. He noted a gray F-150 and a battered Chevy Express with a landscaping company logo on the side. All the minivans and sedans were gone.

“There he is,” Fick said, when Brad entered the visitor's center. He was leaning on the service counter in a pair of Carhartts that must have been broiling, a Baltimore Ravens t-shirt, and go-fasters. For once he didn't look exhausted or besieged by idiocy. He looked like he was already out. “Thanks, Terry.”

The ranger shrugged at Brad, something like 'wasn't me, buddy', and retrieved his keys from a peg on the far wall.

“Come on, Sergeant.” Fick herded him out the door and back into the parking lot, where Brad noticed the Dartmouth bumper sticker on the steel-gray pickup, moments too late “Jesus, Brad, did you sleep in a hole?”

There was a tense, wordless little skirmish where Brad wanted to follow on the bike and Fick wanted the both of them in the truck. Fick won. Brad strapped the Hornet onto the truck bed with buckle ties and refused to feel humiliated about it. He hoped he scratched Fick's paint job.

The cab was stifling from sitting in the lot. Fick must have been there hours. Brad slid into the passenger's side and cranked the window down immediately, staring out at the desert.

“I need some fucking coffee for this,” Fick said.

* * *

“Your mother is worried about you,” Fick said, which answered that question “She told Gina Espera this is twice as long as you usually run off for.”

Brad was going to murder Poke. Of all people he should know what happened to snitches.

They were in a trucker diner the size of a closet and open from 3 am to noon. The coffee was burnt and the waitress looked like a recovering meth addict. She could not have been less interested in them and their identical plates of pancakes if she were clinically brain-dead, and she left the coffee pot on the table without being asked. Brad had already resolved to tip her everything he had left in his wallet.

“That this is a habit concerns me, Brad. There are people who understand. _Your men_ understand.”

“What do you care? You won't even be here in a week.”

Fick's eyebrows popped up. “If I didn't know better, Sergeant, which I do, I'd think you were angry at me specifically instead of humanity at large.”

“You're right, sir,” Brad said, and strangled the last strands of syrup out of an upturned Aunt Jemima with a barrage of phlegmatic wheezes “It's none of my fucking business, sir.”

“I am no longer confident in my ability to perform my duties.” Fick took the bottle from him. Brad let go before their hands touched, a jerky little motion he refused to call a flinch. “Some of that is the Corps, and some of it's me. Ultimately, it doesn't matter.”

“You got screwed by the green weenie and now you're claiming irreconcilable moral and philosophical differences,” Brad sneered “Because those of us who stay aren't as righteous, or as smart.”

Fick stared at him blankly. It was the same expression Brad had been relieved to see when Encino Man said something especially retarded, and he played back his outburst, belatedly feeling the flush of shame.

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“It's just not for me, Brad. It's not who I am.”

“What does that _mean_? Of course it's who you are. You do it.” God, he hated that psycho-babble Greenpeace bullshit.

“Not anymore it's not.” Fick topped off his mug from the pot “Like you said-- I do have power over some things. I'm making this decision.”

“Because you went to war to find yourself and didn't like what you learned?”

“You're taking this very personally.” Fick cut into his pancakes pointedly “Get your blood sugar back up to normal levels and then you can resume hoisting me on my own petard.”

Brad obediently started in on his own stack, partly out of habit and partly because Fick was probably right. He was fucked up enough at the moment that minor physiological oscillations would have a disproportionate effect on his perceptions and behaviors.

When he was down to a few soggy slivers of pancake he took a deep gulp of coffee and said, “I don't have PTSD.”

Fick met his eyes. “I know. But you're at risk, and isolating yourself from friends and family is contraindicated.”

“Is that right, Dr. Fick?”

“Affirmative. Have I ever told you I wanted to go to medical school?”

“It's all so fucking _stupid_ ,” Brad grumbled “Organic celery and game shows and tiny sweaters for cats,” and Fick snorted, “A national debate over _what to call French fries_. Don't they have any fucking idea what--”

“No,” Fick said “They don't. It's our job to know, so they don't have to.”

Brad peered at him over his mug. “It is who you are, sir.”

“Excuse me?”

“You said 'our' job.”

“Yeah,” Fick admitted “I'm leaving, but I can't un-know the things I've seen. Everything I do from this point forward will have to honor that in some way. But I can do more good from outside, Brad. You must understand that.”

He didn't, actually. Fick could go somewhere like New York or DC with the lobbyists and oil execs and end up with thousands of deaths on his conscience instead of two or three. People were fucking incompetent anywhere there were people, more so if money was involved, and Fick would always be punished for having principles instead of agendas.

“You're an idealist, sir,” Brad accused.

Fick smiled, the wry, private little thing Brad recognized from moments when there was nothing between them but moonlight and glances and that flat, flat desert horizon “So are you. I recall hearing something about the warrior spirit.”

Brad drew the tines of his fork through syrup, thought about raking leaves or the sand in the miniature Japanese garden his mother kept on her desk in the study. He bet Rudy had one, too. A desert in a box. A mass-produced sandbox.

“What is this really about, Brad?”

He thought, _I can't handle peacetime_ , and then _you're leaving me like it's nothing_. There wasn't one thing it was really about.

“We never learned what happened to the boy,” he heard himself say.

Fick's jaw ticked. “Patterson didn't tell you? He lived, Brad. His name is Ammar, he's eleven years old, and he, his mother, and two sisters are in the process of getting asylum in Spain.”

He knew it was the truth. Fick had never once bullshitted him; even when the bullshit was COC-mandated, he'd always given Brad a look that acknowledged it, as close to an apology as it was possible to get, I _'m sorry I couldn't protect you all from this, but we're in it now, so buck up and face front_.

Face fucking front. Fick was always moving forward. Brad hadn't realized until now that wasn't a given for him. It was just that in country, Fick hadn't _allowed_ himself to look behind.

“Some people would say that doesn't matter,” Fick said “That compared to all the civilians who didn't make it, they're a drop in the bucket. But it does matter, doesn't it?”

Fick was staring straight at him, intense. Willing Brad to understand, if not ordering him to.

“All twenty-two of you matter in particular to me,” Fick said “And that became a problem.”

“You're a better officer for it.” Brad knew this to be true.

“I was a better platoon commander,” Fick corrected “But I couldn't fulfill my obligations to all of you and to Command at the same time. And that's an officer's job, Brad.”

 _Who are you trying to convince_ , he thought, but kept it to himself. He sucked down the remainder of his coffee, feeling just as cold.

Fick paid the bill at the register, and Brad emptied his wallet out onto the table.

Outside at the truck, Fick brushed crumbling, caked dirt off the grille and winced when the metal of the hood burned his hand. It was a lot of truck for Boston. Brad assumed he planned on selling it.

“East or West, Brad?” he asked “I have all day.”

An 18-wheeler rocketed by, eating asphalt and spewing out a wake of choking dust. The sunlight in Arizona was different from the sunlight in Iraq, steamy oranges and golds instead of flat, searing white. That cloud of dust passed over and through Fick's frame like a fiery veil, and Brad _burned_ like he hadn't since the over-watch in Baghdad when Fick had turned to him in the dark and peeled back an inch of his armor, _I can be wrong_ , showed Brad a bloody sliver of his weakness like a beating heart.

Fick wiped the desert from his face. He was so fucking beautiful and terrible it hurt to look at him.

“East,” Brad said.

* * *

Brad didn't think Fick was exactly as fine as he was pretending to be, because he drove like a maniac.

It was quite a feat on flat, straight stretches of empty highway, but as soon as Brad had his helmet on and his key in the ignition Fick had backed out of the lot and floored it. Brad could hear the Ford protesting such treatment, skids and whines that gave way to a roar as it hit 80 and kept accelerating. Brad let him have the lead. The Hornet topped out at 245kph with good wind, over 150 miles per hour. It wasn't a fair race.

He toed himself onto the shoulder and idled, letting a sedan roll past. White paint on the lane declared 'Watch For Cattle'. He breathed, listened to his own breath and his own pulse inside the helmet. One. Two.

He blew past the sedan and two box trucks, thrumming along with the engine, up up up. He had Fick in his sights again within a minute. Fick was being careful, slowing to 85 or 90 when passing before kicking it hard on the empty stretches. Brad bet that thing couldn't cap 110 mph. Fick passed a 4-door; Brad slid by the both of them on the far left, heart pounding like it rarely did in theater. This was all on him. No one to watch his back, and no one for him to worry about, either. He was in control. Every inch of Brad listed towards the horizon, pulled like he was on a hook.

The Ford rumbled behind him, a big hulking thing that couldn't catch him. He let the Hornet ease slowly, let Fick pass him on the straightaway. They leapfrogged across the desert like that, sleek buzzing bike and thunderous truck. He gave chase, and was chased, and never quite let himself be caught.

* * *

Finally, after timeless stretches of scrub brush and the dusty border of the Quinlan mountains to the south, they passed a crooked green sign claiming they were entering Sonoran National Monument. This was the only indication they were on Federal land.

Fick peeled off onto a dirt feeder road, and slowed enough that Brad could hear the radio on inside the cab, bass thrumming. Brad bumped along after him for a good half a klick before the truck turned and shuddered to a stop, pluming up dirt like a skater shaving ice.

Brad followed suit, forming the other leg of a herringbone formation automatically before killing the engine. He stayed seated for a moment. His legs were shaking with adrenaline.

It was The Who on the radio. Roger Daltrey testified that he could _see for miles and miles and miles and miles_ \--

Fick cut his engine, too, and sat. The silence was starting to fuck with Brad. He dismounted and pulled off the helmet. The driver's side door opened, and Fick leaned out, grinning toothily.

“Better now?” he asked. Behind him the cab was in disarray; parking passes and pens and cassette tapes littered the foot well, Fick's various papers clung to the passenger's seat. “I feel better.”

“You put on a good act, sir,” Brad managed between his racing pulse and his tingling hands and his fucking Hornet boner, god, what a machine “How many people know you're actually a fucking lunatic?”

“Six,” Fick said, and stepped out of his vehicle “I have to piss.”

“Don't let me stop you.”

“I'm not. Call your mother.”

He had four text messages from Ray that he couldn't open without being charged a fortune by Verizon, which Ray well knew, and a missed called from Rudy. He dialed his mother. She picked up on the third ring. “Dr. Colbert speaking.”

“You and Senora Espera got the grapevine all aflutter,” he said.

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” she returned lightly “Hello, first and only son. How are you?”

“I'm fine, mom. I'll be back soon.”

“Incredible inventions, cellular phones. You can be miles deep in the outback and I'm still able to hear you not telling me things.”

He let his eyes drift past the truck to Fick's head and shoulders, which were just visible above the berm he'd skidded down. “I'm fine. My CO is with me.”

“The Classicist?”

“The very same.”

“Are you studying Cicero together?”

“No, we're going to get black-out drunk and spend my combat bonus on fireworks and pixie stix. I'll be in the brig by nightfall too smashed to hang myself with my own bootlaces.”

She snorted. “You're feeling better.”

“Yeah. Give me a day or two.”

“You don't need my permission, Bradley,” she sighed “I just wanted to make sure you were still breathing.”

For the first time since he got back he thought about how this must be for her, after six months of tensing up every time the phone rang, watching the news and wondering if it was him or someone else's son who would be coming home in a box. She did, in fact, have some experience with this.

Fick hauled himself back up the berm and leaned on the hood of the Ford, watching him openly, curiously.

“I will leave my phone on,” he promised “And I'll be home as soon as I'm ready.”

* * *

Another klick down the feeder road, a Texaco with two skinny, vintage gas pumps sprouted out of the dust. Behind it a cluster of squat houses, RVs, and sheds, threaded through with barbed-wire fencing, had accumulated like frogs around fresh water. A white cross made of plywood, taller than him, leaned slightly Southward. An American hamlet.

Brad was out of cash. Fick went in to pay for 13 gallons unleaded while Brad lingered outside, sweating in his leathers. He took refuge under the thin ridge of shadow the station provided, plastering his back up against bare brick. A woman somewhere between fifty and eighty with a wrinkled face the color of baked clay watched him from a white plastic deck chair a few feet away. Brad couldn't tell if she was Indian, Hispanic, or just permanently sunburnt. She was what Poke would call 'fat as a motherfucker', and she was wearing an American-flag print handkerchief on her head Doc Bryan style.

Brad tipped his head slightly in acknowledgement. The woman leaned over to her other side and spat a dark line of dip out into the dirt. The plastic chair whined and creaked, two legs leaving the ground and then landing again hard.

“Cope?” Brad asked, and got a glistening, golden grin in return.

Behind him, the bell over the door rattled, tink tink tink. Fick had a plastic bag in one hand and a cardboard crate of Miller by the handle in the other. It made the tendons in his forearm stand out like cables. “Come on, Sergeant.”

Brad pushed off from the wall. The woman winked, and sketched a salute at him.

* * *

“You have shit taste in road food,” Brad decided, scraping a molten slur of chocolate coating out of a Little Debbie packet with his thumb.

“There's a pot roast MRE in the glove compartment if you're going to bitch,” Fick said, through a mouthful of corn syrup (regular) and corn syrup (high fructose) “I put it in there when I bought the truck, so it's probably still good.”

Brad eyed the fender again, this time more closely. It was a '99. He reached into the bag and came up with a Twinkie.

“Thought so,” Fick said, and resumed his crusade against heart health, slumped against the rear wheel with his ass in the dirt. Brad didn't remember ever seeing him eat outside the wire, certainly not spread out like this against a vehicle, surrounded by crinkly wrappers like any other grunt.

“They don't eat shit like this in Boston,” Brad guessed “It's all organic carrot juice and kale salads and pine nuts out there. You'd have to smuggle in the Easy Mac under threat of public flogging.”

“Ah. I see you've been to San Diego.”

Brad huffed. Point to the Captain.

“What we don't have is Waffle House and In-N-Out,” Fick mourned, crunching a fistful of cellophane into a crooked plastic lozenge “I'll miss a lot of things.”

Brad folded his own trash in algorithmically-reducible rectangles, over and under until he had a tiny accordion between his fingers. They were far enough off I-8 that the sound of the occasional vehicle faded into that desert white-noise, the low thrum of miles of empty space and all the improbable life that inhabited it. It wasn't anything like Iraq, really. The only same thing was the flatness, and Fick.

“You'll never have that rush again,” Brad said, meaning combat, of course. There was nothing like it. Sometimes he'd get lost enough in a training exercise to feel a shadow of it, half-memory, but Fick was giving that up, too. No more mountain warfare courses or night dives. No more live fire or jump exercises.

“I know,” Fick said.

“You're giving it up.” He almost, but didn't say, _you're giving up_.

“That's life. I gave up some things to do this, you know.” Fick stared out at the horizon calmly, forearms on his crossed knees, fingertips kissing the dirt “Not small things, either.” 

"You can always go back to med school, sir” Brad said, but Fick turned to him and laughed, a wry little thing, almost bitter.

His eyes were very pale green. They fixed Brad in place like a butterfly tacked to a board, and always had. Fick had a look that could run you through and string you up until you confessed to your own bullshit in front of God and everybody. _You know that's not what I meant._

Brad did know. He'd spent his adult life packed like a sardine against other guys in a variety of containers at various levels of undress, and not one of them had looked at him like Fick did when their knees touched. Or maybe some had and Brad only noticed when it was Fick, because otherwise he didn't care, and wasn't looking.

Any time Fick was in eye-shot, Brad was looking. The cant of Fick's hips or the turn of his mouth contained reams of information. He was a font of good, if mostly unactionable, intelligence. Postings on four continents and various stints at sea, and Fick was the most interesting thing Brad had ever laid eyes on. Still was, even in jeans and t-shirt propped up against his prototypically unremarkable American-made truck, choking down gas station food.

Like most things Brad found interesting (a category spanning rip current, motorcycles, and howitzers) Fick was eminently capable of fucking him up beyond all recognition.

“East or West, Brad?”

Those were the choices. There was only one road.

* * *

15 miles south of Maricopa Fick got them a room in a single-story Travelodge. It was the kind of room where murders, drug deals, and Catholic abortions could all plausibly have happened, maybe even simultaneously. There was no A/C unit in the window, though, and no television.

Brad ditched both of the bedspreads immediately. “Doesn't it offend your overdeveloped sense of honor and righteousness as a commander to give your subordinates hepatitis?”

“No. You owe me twenty-two dollars and fifty cents.”

Brad showered in a stall that was more like an upright coffin, buffing dirt off with the lone hand towel and his open palms. He had no soap besides the travel-sized Barbasol he'd been stretching since LSA-5 and he intended to use it up on a decent shave.

Standing at the sink, he pulled on the thermal underlayer he had stuffed in the bottom of his pack. It was the only clean thing. Sweat gathered in the crook of his knee.

He had to hunch down to see his chin in the mirror. When he finally emerged, clean-shaven to regs, Fick was lying on his back on the far bed with one arm slung over his eyes, limp as putty. He looked like a Victorian maiden who'd grown faint and swooned onto the nearest flat surface.

“I didn't bring smelling salts,” Brad said “I see now that was a glaring oversight.”

Fick smirked, but didn't move. “It's fucking hot.”

“It's actually the ideal temperature for the various bacteria and fungi that are breeding in that bathroom. I suggest a prophylactic application of tinactin.”

“Fuck this,” Fick said, and crunched himself upright, rolling his neck as he went “Smoke?”

It was cooler outside, though not by much. Fick peeled the cellophane off a carton of Winston Reds and produced an equally dirt-cheap Bic lighter. Brad leaned with him against a paint-chipped salmon pink railing that had rusted into the concrete lot and tried not to cough. Outside of the strange circumstance of being billeted in a cigarette factory, this was not a habit he cultivated, and he was surprised to learn that Fick did. It didn't fit his clean image, and he was a dedicated runner.

“Are you headed for Baltimore or Boston?” Brad asked.

“Southern Maryland. Leaving the truck with my sister.”

“Are you coming back?”

Fick shrugged. “When leave's over, for a bit. Paperwork. Mike threatened to skin me if I bailed on the party.”

“No shit. I hear he has quite a collection of boot officer scalps.”

“Call me that again,” Fick suggested lightly; the corner of his mouth quirked.

“I'd like to call you all kinds of things, sir,” Brad confided, matching his tone, keeping it a joke. Plausible deniability. “Is this to be construed as blanket permission?”

“Don't,” Fick said, soft.

Brad sighed, and didn't.

“Why do you come out here, after?” Fick wondered “Why not go sky-diving or whoring or something, if you need a rush? Or fuck, just call Person. I hear he's in bat country.”

Brad rolled the filter between his fingers, and thought about it. He was suffused with a dull exhaustion that weighted down his every cell. He hadn't had more than ten nights of uninterrupted sleep in the last six months. That was the kind of shit that really ran your clock out, months of bad sleep and bad nutrition. Every year he got more flack from the doctor about his back, his knees, and now here he was standing outside a roach motel in Arizona full of Twinkies and tobacco when there was a good bed and three Whole Foods within walking distance waiting for him at home.

He didn't want home. At home, he never knew what he was hungry for.

“Something's missing, for me,” he said “Or in me, maybe.”

Fick watched him, unmoving. White ash fell from between his fingers in clumps, scattered into dust at their feet.

“Always has been. And I can fill it with combat or whores or whatever substance, but one day I'll be too old for that. And then what?

I don't know what I want. I just know it's not at home, anymore.”

Brad had felt whole before, but only for moments. Mostly in childhood.

Fick chuckled low and throaty, like Brad wasn't saying out loud to him all the things he'd been too chickenshit to articulate to himself “You're searching for something, so you came to the desert. A place where there's nothing to find.”

“Oh, fuck off, sir. You went to _war_ to find yourself.”

“No.” Fick cut a look at him, blade sharp “I know exactly who and what I am. And I can't be that, in this Corps.” He drew heavily on the cig, sucking the cherry back. “Maybe things used to be different. I don't know. I wanted to stand for something, and I bought a line. That's on me.”

Nothing was missing for Fick, apparently. So off he would go, already complete as a person, looking for the place that would meet his exacting moral standards, the Marines just a youthful mistake he made.

What a load of bull.

A time Brad felt whole-- on a berm outside Al Rifa, the plastic mold of the PEC-10 imprinting a clean circle on his filthy face, Fick adjusting his binos to Brad's range, saying, “I'm seeing what you see”, too grimly to just mean the terrain.

Fick beside him in the brutal daylight as the Air Force rained down hatred and discontent on women and children, still and silent and regal as a totem, just planting himself there where Brad was without a word, witnessing.

Fick's hands on their map of the desert, touching the places they'd been, tracing the miles they had still to go.

“If you're so fucking certain, sir,” Brad bit out “then why did you run away from me?”

Fick didn't look at him. He took one last drag, smudged the cig out against the railing with his thumb, and said, “Not everything is about you, Brad.” Then he went back inside.

Brad finished his cigarette, then lit another one. By the time he crawled into his bed the bathroom door was closed and Fick was nowhere to be found.

Brad closed his eyes. He slept, and did not dream.

* * *

He woke to the feeling of being watched, and reached for his rifle. The surge of chilling panic when it wasn't there faded when his fingers hit linen instead of dirt or coarse synthetic weave. He was in a bed.

He glassed the room without moving his head: dark, window window door. Entrances and exits.

Fick was standing in the doorway to the en-suite, a towel around his hips. The moonlight washed him white and blue, and Brad thought stupidly of _Guernica_ , that slate-colored gory mass of flesh and iron. His shaved head and the fine hairs along his arms prickled with moonlight, outlining him in chalk. He was certainly as still as a painting, regarding Brad coolly in the dark.

Brad met his gaze, a dare. Fick stepped closer, and then one of his knees was on the foot of Brad's bed, and one of his hands planted heavily into the mattress beside Brad's ribs, and a damp, smooth torso arched over Brad's own chest like a wave, and he held his breath and let it take him under.

* * *

He wasn't daring anymore. He just gave, and took. He wasn't sure what to make of the tenderness of it, but Fick began like that and so it went on; slow, deep kisses and lingering touches. Fick kept his eyes open, and so Brad did too. Fick was silent, so Brad was too. Fick led, Brad followed.

He didn't know what the staring meant, but he didn't look away, wouldn't be the one to blink even though Fick bored into him with that look, revealing something at the same time as he demanded it back, _see me_ , _see me_ , _let me see you_.

This was what he'd wanted. So what if the reality of it scared him a little-- everything Brad had ever really wanted, everything worth doing, had scared him a little at some point.

He knew fuck all about doing this with another man, but it was Fick. That made everything easy. He had six months worth of questions to answer-- what Fick's sweat tasted like, whether the skin of his throat was soft, where he liked to be kissed. Fick let him investigate until Brad tried to turn them over, which got him a palm spread against his chest and the cool absence of the rest of Fick as he retreated to retrieve what Brad was about to learn was a lubricated condom from his wallet.

Fick straddled him, yanked Brad's shorts down, and rolled it onto him rather unceremoniously. It seemed like Brad's job was, for the moment, to lie there and not move, so he did his best to not interrupt while Fick planted both of his hands on Brad's ribs and worked himself onto Brad's cock in torturous increments. The view more than made up for any discomfort, but Fick's nails bit into his skin more than once when Brad's hips twitched up against his will, eager to chase that impossible warmth and tightness.

The noise Fick made when he sat all the way back was familiar from the factory hallway. Brad had his hands on Fick's hips instantly, desperate to hear it again, to be the reason why Fick made noise or shivered or did anything at all.

But he was so perfectly controlled. Fick's knees dug hard into the mattress, his thighs coiled and bunched as he rose, exposing Brad inch by inch to the cool air of the room. When Fick sat back down on him again Brad broke, finally, the “Oh fuck, sir,” escaping between his teeth.

Fick rocked firmly, powerfully, finding the angle he wanted and dropping down onto his elbows by Brad's face, riding him hard.

“My name,” he ordered, lips brushing Brad's sweaty cheek, teeth scoring his ear “is Nate.”

Brad cupped the back of his head, fumbled their faces together. Fick-- Nate's forehead ground against his own bruisingly hard. Their noses bumped. Neither looked away.

* * *

When Brad woke again his watch claimed it was 0225 and Nate was making muffled, pained noises deep in his throat, his body trembling and stiff on the edge of the bed. Sweat shone on his forehead, gleamed on the stringy tendons of his arched neck.

Conventional wisdom was not to wake the guy. Conventional wisdom was as full of shit as Captain Well-Adjusted Fick was, apparently.

Brad stood up, walked to the end of the bed, and curled his hand firmly around one twitching foot. It was likely that Nate would come to swinging.

“Nate,” he said, loudly “Nate.”

Nate went quiet, but his face didn't untwist. His fists were clenched in the bedding.

“Lieutenant.”

Nate jolted upright like Frankenstein's monster getting his battery charged, chest heaving. Brad ran a thumb along his sole through the sheet, ball to heel to the rhythm of his own slow breaths. Gradually, Nate's slowed to match.

“Smells like death in here,” he croaked, and laughed.

“No it doesn't.” Decomposing flesh had a very distinct smell. It was impossible to mistake something else for it, once you knew.

“I know. Open the fucking window.”

Brad opened the window. Cool, dry night air wafted through the dirty screen.

“I'm sorry about the road blocks,” Nate said “You were right. I should have tried harder to find a solution.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Brad told him, and settled back down on the bed with an accompanying creak “Don't even do that shit.”

“I never even saw the inside of the car. I talked to Reyes last week, and now I can't stop dreaming about it.”

“Kids are the worst,” Brad agreed.

Nate laid down, staring up the ceiling. “Yeah. But I think I would have shot her myself if it meant getting all of you home unharmed.”

“That's a pointless fucking hypothetical. Stop twisting yourself up and go back to sleep.”

Nate reached across the sheets to brush the back of his index finger over Brad's wrist. His skin was cold.

“You should come see me sometime, in Boston. I'd like that.”

Brad caught his hand properly, and held it. “Go to sleep, Nate.”

* * *

I-8 ended at Casa Grande, split into a two-pronged freeway between Phoenix and Tuscon, North-South. End of the line. They were into civilization by then anyway-- in the distance, over stretches of tilled land, Brad could see the triumphant arches of a WalMart.

Nate filled Brad's tank at a clean, modern Texaco and stuffed a pair of folded twenties into Brad's front right pocket, leaving his hand there longer than necessary.

“Sixty two dollars and fifty cents,” he murmured “One day I'll come to collect.”

Brad swallowed. Nate's fingertips teased him through thin layers of fabric. “Or you can take it off my plane ticket.”

“Even better.” He knew what hopefulness looked like on Nate already, but this was the first time he'd seen it since Mathilda. It twisted his guts up like a dishrag.

“You're losing daylight,” Nate chided, making use of that private smile because Brad was in on the joke and they were both lingering with miles to go.

Brad glassed the empty lot, the cashier's shed with the shades drawn. The only human-looking thing in 800 meters was the crooked yucca stooped over his Hornet like an admiring passerby.

He cupped Nate's face and bit his mouth open gently, thumbs shifted by Nate's smile. Brad wasn't a particularly artful kisser, he knew-- it wasn't something he'd devoted much attention to, after he swore off relationships. But Nate's mouth was a fascinating AO, tastes and textures and unexpected counter-attacks from a man who was as intentional about kissing as he was about everything else. Brad wanted hours just for this. 

He pulled away before he really started something he couldn't finish. “I'll see you.”

Nate took pity on the both of them, and got back in the truck. Brad watched him pull out of the lot and merge Northbound at a polite and reasonable speed. The road was fucking deserted and Nate still used his turn signal like a responsible citizen. Brad wondered who the other five people were who knew about Nate Fick's hidden proclivity for abject fucking lunacy.

The prospect of home still turned his stomach, but it was Monday and he hadn't been to an In-N-Out in over half a year, which was a travesty and probably grounds to eject him permanently from the People's Republic of SoCal. He keyed up the Hornet and it came to life under him. Speed and solitude.

He turned West, and rode.


End file.
